Avoid Being in Road Accidents at all Costs

The Book

The Book - Atmasvasth - A Guide to Ageing Healthfully

A 15-point guide to living long, healthy

AtmasvasthBhavin Jankharia

The Detailed 15-Point Guide to Live Long, Healthy

The 15-Point Guide - Detailed

The detailed 15-points guide to live long, healthy

AtmasvasthBhavin Jankharia

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What is the point of being physically active, eating sensibly, sleeping well, taking vaccines, not smoking, etc, if you get knocked down while walking or are involved in a car accident while driving or being driven and sustain a grievous injury or die?

The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways [1] has just released the 2022 road accident numbers. India had 4.6L (461,312) accidents causing 4.4L (443,366) injuries in 2022, with 1.5L (155,781) deaths. 

While the rate of injuries is low compared to the rest of the world (25 per 100,000 population compared to 590/100,000 in the United States), given that almost 33% of people involved in accidents in 2022 died and another 31% had grievous injury that needed hospitalization, India tops the list of road accident deaths in the world, though at 9.5/100,000, it still has a lower rate per 100,000 population (simply because we are 1.4 billion people) than the US, which has a death rate from road accidents of 11.7/100,000, Venezuela being the highest at 39.4/100,000.

This makes road accidents the 9^th or 10^th biggest killer in India, higher than deaths from any individual cancer. For e.g. breast cancer deaths were around 90,000 as of 2020.

Since road accidents are such a common cause of death, we need to know what to do to mitigate the risk of an accident and if we do get into one, to reduce the risk of injury and death. For that we need to know what causes accidents, injuries and deaths in India. 

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Speeding was the commonest cause of accident and death (75.2%). Since only one cause was given as the main cause, it is highly possible that the person speeding was also drunk and it was up to the person writing the accident report to decide which cause to put as the primary one in their report. So, even though drunk driving came in at 2.5%, the number is likely to be much much higher.

The people who died the most (44.5%) were those on two-wheelers, followed by pedestrians (19.5%) and then cars at 12.5%. Riding a two-wheeler is perhaps the most dangerous thing to do in India, followed by walking on the road.

Pedestrians were killed most by two-wheelers, followed closely by cars and then trucks. Two-wheeler riders on the other hand were  killed mainly by other two-wheeler riders followed by cars and trucks.

The vast majority of those killed were men (73%).

These are just those who were killed. An equal number had grievous injury, which potentially will lead to a reduced lifespan and healthspan.

So knowing all this, what can we do to mitigate the risk of grievous injury or death from a road accident?

Here are some measures and thoughts!

A. If driving or being driven

1. Do not ride two-wheelers. Unless you have no choice, just DO NOT. And if you have to, the driver and the passenger must both wear helmets. Of the 74,000 two-wheeler riders who died, 50,000 odd were not wearing helmets, of which 70% were drivers and the rest were passengers. 

2. Do not drive at night on non-city highways. It is scary. Trucks are driven by drunk drivers and they often drive on the wrong side of the road or they use their headlights without dimmers and blind you. It is not worth saving time by driving at night. 41% of all deaths occurred between 6PM and 6AM.

3. Do not be driven at night outside of busy city roads. As tourists or for work, we often think it is a good idea to travel at night and save time. Bus drivers drink and/or fall asleep. Taxi drivers are also often sleepy. All this increases the risk of accidents and death. 

4. Do not speed. The commonest cause of accidents is speeding. Period. Remember, the older you get, the slower are your reflexes and trying to emulate an F1 driver on the Mumbai-Pune or Samruddhi expressways is a sure-fire way of getting into trouble.

5. Wear seatbelts wherever you are seated, front or back. Period. It is not about the law, it is about your safety. Of the 21,000 killed in car accidents, 16,000 odd were not wearing seatbelts, half drivers and half passengers. Seatbelts reduce the risk of death by 65% [3].

6. Drive in cars with airbags. Airbags are less effective than seatbelts, but typically reduce the risk of death in an accident by another 8-10% [3].

7. Do not keep your child on your lap, especially in the front seat. If a collision happens, that child will become your cushion and be crushed between you and the dashboard. You may live, but the child is likely to die.

8. Do not drink and drive or be driven by someone who is drunk.

9. Don’t tailgate. Keep a good distance between you and the car in front of you. Assume that at some point the car in front will brake suddenly and you must have enough space to brake and not hit the car in front of you. 

10. Obey traffic rules, even if others around you don’t. Slow down at intersections even if the signal is green for you to go, because you don’t know which idiot is going to illegally cross you, with no warning, especially if there is less traffic.  The maximum accidents and deaths occurred at T-junctions and four-arm junctions (total 44%) as shown in this figure.

11. It is better to get into an accident, if you have to, within a major urban city. In Mumbai, of the 1895 accidents, deaths were 371 (19%) against the 33% country average. This means that outside the major cities, medical services are so abysmal that your chance of survival drops significantly. Which also means that you have to be extra-careful when driving or being driven outside urban environments.

B. If you are a pedestrian

1. Assume that every two-wheeler, car or bus is a potential killer.

2. Use footpaths where available.

3. If you have to walk on the roads, face the traffic. That way you at least know what is coming towards you.

4. If you are walking on the road with a second person or with more people, try and walk single file. 

5. Use a little common sense. Do not walk along the divider or along the inner side of a roundabout. You don’t want to be the idiot in this picture.

6. Use traffic light junctions and zebra crossings to cross roads as far as possible. Unfortunately, people will cross whenever they want, wherever they want, even though a zebra crossing is available as the picture below shows.

7. Be aware of your surroundings. Do not walk on roads or cross roads while on the phone or while messaging, etc. Again, the vehicle does not care about you and if you die or are seriously injured by someone, unless you can prove they were drunk, the consequences are at best 2 years of imprisonment, which is irrelevant, if you are dead or seriously injured.

What does this mean for you and I? In our atmasvasth quest to live long, healthy, it is important not to get into a road accident. While there are many situations that may be out of your control, there are ways of mitigating the risk of an accident and of injury or death, if you do get into one by adhering to the safe practices mentioned. 

Footnotes

1. Road accidents in India. 2022 Report of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways

2. Figure from the publication, Causes of Death Statistics 2017-2019, Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, India, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India

3. Cummings P et al. Association of driver air bags with driver fatality: a matched cohort study. BMJ. 2002 May 11;324(7346):1119-22.